The Trojan Room Coffee Machine

Click here
for an up to date picture of the Trojan Room coffee machine.

About this service

This service was created as the first application to use a new RPC mechanism
designed in the Computer Laboratory - MSRPC2. It runs over MSNL
(Multi-Service Network Layer) - a network layer protocol designed for ATM
networks.

A video capture board in an Acorn Archimedes grabs one frame every second
and the WWW server requests a frame from it using MSRPC2 (indirectly). Each
frame is JPEG encoded by the Archimedes.

The online coffee pot actually predates our World Wide Web server by some time.
If you want to know how it all came about, take a look at its (non-technical)
biography.

Local radio report

On 11th November 1994, we were visited by a reporter from our local
radio station, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, to make a report on this
service. Naturally we connected a radio to one of our workstations
and relayed the broadcast over our local network. The transmission
was also recorded digitally, and now
you can hear it too.

We are grateful to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire for giving permission
to put this audio file on the Web.